The Bloomsbury Bohemians in the British Countryside
This content was originally published by FRANCINE PROSE on 9 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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I could never have visited the area without making a literary pilgrimage to Monk’s House, Woolf’s last home, where she spent summers beginning in 1919, where she lived full time after her house in London was bombed in 1940, and where she drowned herself in the nearby River Ouse in March 1941. Located in the tiny village of Rodmell, it’s a short drive from Charleston. Michael Cunningham, who came here in connection with his novel “The Hours,” in which Virginia Woolf is a principal character, said that Woolf’s house looks like a graduate student’s apartment compared with her sister’s home. Monk’s House is lovely, but smaller, more restrained, almost spartan in comparison to the exuberance of Charleston. At the bottom of the garden at Monk’s House is the writing studio where Woolf worked, and which is set up to recreate the objects she liked to have around her and the atmosphere in which she wrote.
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There was one more trip that I wanted to make, to Farley Farm House, also a short drive from Charleston. This was the home where the great American photographer Lee Miller lived with her husband, Sir Roland Penrose, the British Surrealist painter, and their son. It was a vacation place and party house for Max Ernst, Miró, Picasso, Man Ray, Saul Steinberg, Dorothea Tanning and Dylan Thomas. Born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., the strikingly beautiful Miller was a fashion model before departing for Paris where she lived with, and learned from, Man Ray. She became an intrepid war correspondent and was among the first photojournalists to document the Allies’ entry into Nazi concentration camps. Her photographs were initially published in Vogue magazine.
Photo
In Tunbridge Wells, Kent, is the Pantiles Cafe.
Credit
Andy Haslam for The New York Times
It was sheer good luck that our last free afternoon in that part of Sussex happened to fall on the day (the last Sunday of each month) that Farley Farm House is open to visitors. Miller and Mr. Penrose’s son, Antony Penrose, graciously took us around a place that is a working farm, a living memorial, a handsome dwelling and an astonishing small museum. Like Charleston, its walls are covered with art and decorated with murals, and scattered throughout the rooms are stunning examples of art from Asia and Africa. He pointed out the iconic photograph of Miller taking a bath in Hitler’s bathtub, taken by her wartime colleague David Scherman, after the liberation of Munich.
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Documents, mementos, sketches, paintings and photographs illustrate the art-historic guest list. In the last decades of her life, Lee Miller became a hugely ambitious cook; Antony Penrose’s book “The Home of the Surrealists” includes photographs of dishes that his mother made, among them, two cauliflowers tinted and made to look like a pair of pink breasts surrounded by deviled eggs resembling eyes, a creation that demonstrated her fondness for making Surrealist sculptures of food. Miller’s handsome, functional kitchen at Farley Farm House has been left exactly as it was.
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